A recent example from IT blog pskl.us brought to light a harsh tactic for a link removal.  A company had contacted pskl.us looking to have links removed via a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown notice.  The DMCA specifically targets copyright infringment on the internet.  The specific note in question blamed the links on financial loses and search engine penalties.  Here’s the exact link removal request sent (Note: the company name was removed from our copy below as we have not seen the official emails):

It has come to our attention that your website or website hosted by your company contains links to <website> which results in financial losses by the company we represent, because of search engine penalties.

I request you to remove from following website (pskl.us) all links to <website> website as soon as possible. In order to find the links please do the following: 1) If this is an online website directory, use directory’s search system to find “<company>” links. 2) If there are hidden links in the source code of website, open website’s main page and view its source code. Search for “<website> in the source code and you will see hidden links.

I have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by <company> its agents, or the law. Therefore, this letter is an official notification to effect removal of the detected infringement listed in this letter.

I further declare under penalty of perjury that I am authorized to act on behalf of copyright holder and that the information in this letter is accurate.

Please, inform me within 48 hours of the results of your actions. Otherwise we will be forced to contact your ISP. < company > will be perusing legal action if the webmaster does not remove the referenced link within 48 hours. < company >  will be forced to include the hosting company in the suite for trademark infringement.

After this email was received by pskl.us a lengthy back and forth was had.  It came out that someone at the company (or at a competitive company) had purchased hundreds of thousands of links to the site:

 However, we had a site cloak <company> and generate over 700K back links to our site without our knowledge.  Google stepped in and slapped us with a search ranking penalty to which our business has suffered major losses.

So this drastic technique brings up the point, is linking to other’s content illegal?

Linking Legality

In the United States many courts have found that merely linking to someone else’s public website is not illegal as long as the link is not to illegal or infringing content.  It should be known that actual theft of content by copying or linking to framed content from others has been defended as well as linking to illegal or infringing content.

Ford Motor Company v. 2600 Enterprises

The plaintiff, Ford Motor Company, was displeased with the way vulgar domains (such F#ckgeneralmotors.com) were linked directly to Ford.  Ford lost the dispute as the court found that the link did not create a cause of action for trademark dilution, infringement or unfair competition.  The court also specifically stated:

“This court does not believe that Congress intended the [Federal Trademark Dilution Act] to be used by trademark holders as a tool for eliminating Internet links that, in the trademark holder’s subjective view, somehow disparage its trademark. Trademark law does not permit Plaintiff to enjoin persons from linking to its homepage simply because it does not like the domain name of other content of the linking webpage.”

Ticketmaster Corp. v. Tickets.com, Inc.

In 2000 Ticketmaster brought a suit against Tickets.com for essentially “deep linking” to event pages where tickets could be purchased.  Tickets.com was simply linking to a public even page where purchases could be publicly made and the lawsuit was dismissed.  The court also made it clear that the act of linking was not against the law:

“hyperlinking [without framing] does not itself involve a violation of the Copyright Act … since no copying is involved … the customer is automatically transferred to the particular genuine web page of the original author. There is no deception in what is happening. This is analogous to using a library’s card index to get reference to particular items, albeit faster and more efficiently.”

and

“the customer is automatically transferred to the particular genuine web page of the original author. There is no deception in what is happening. This is analogous to using a library’s card index to get reference to particular items, albeit faster and more efficiently.”

In addition, those operating message boards, allowing user comments or hosting user generated content have even more protection under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

In conclusion, linking to others (legal, non-infringing) content is perfectly legal.  With that said have you seen an uptick in link removal requests?

Three settings currently exist:

• Rotate evenly
• Optimize for clicks
• Optimize for conversions

The “rotate evenly” setting has been the preferred type for achieving apples-to-apples testing as ads were evenly disbursed at all times.   The change will now require users who are using ads to test landing pages or copy-based conversions to be limited to 30 days per trial.   Each time creative is enabled or edited the 30-day window will restart over again.

This change is being implemented to improve performance.  Google states:

“This change will enable us to provide users with the most relevant ad experience and should help advertisers improve the performance of their AdWords accounts. “

Any creative not changed within the past 30 days will be immediately converted to “optimize-for-clicks” next week.  For more information see the Inside AdWords blog.

In Starcraft a variety of races exist, one of which are “Zergs.”  These insect-like creatures don’t overpower, rather that overtake others by sheer numbers.  The zerg attack is also know as “zerging” or the “zerg rush” and is popular gamer jargon for both Starcraft and other video games.

The following video depicts an actual Zerg Rush video in the game of Starcraft:

Click here to view the embedded video.

When the term is inputted, a flock of Google’s “o’s” attack the results while the user has to try to fend them off.  The mouse becomes a target and “o’s” can be destroyed:

Once the searcher inevitably fails at protecting the results, the “o’s” flock back up to the top of the page, for a message of “GG.”  Of course “GG” is gamer shorthand for “Good Game.”:

Once completed users can share their scores via Gogole+.  Give it a try by searching for “zerg rush” on Google!

Not only is the Twitter icon & large grey “trending” button displayed underneath the link, but the number of shares is displayed as well.  It’s important to note that this the Twitter trend enabled post is outside of the Bing News section, rather placed atop the SERPs on it’s own merit.  Will highly shared links have a shortcut to the top results?  Only time will tell.

Bing renewed their deal with Twitter back in September while Google failed to renew theirs.  Another partner of Bing is Facebook which currently integrates liked content, friend enabled results and shared information.  Google, on the other hand, only utilizes direct social integration with Google+.

We were unable to replicate this feature on a variety of popular trends, but the original article can be seen on techie-buzz.com.

Eric Enge performed the interview for Stone Temple and didn’t pull any punches on social indicators or author authority.  Microsoft was surprisingly open with their results, which made for a refreshing read.  Some main highlights from the interview were:

Social Indicators

Yiu was straightforward when talking about how Bing did relying on social sites to enhance their results.  He stated multiple times that it social is synergistic with search, but not a standalone indicator that will replace search.  Yiu gave a great quote when describing Bing’s Social Search:

“So today, the algorithm is flavored by people.”

When describing how people like content that can be seen by others in the search results Yiu also stated:

“We are trying to merge a little bit of the search and browsing intent into one, and have your friends help you navigate the web a little bit better. In a way we are bringing the office water cooler to the search engine.”

Yiu also stressed the importance of fresh content in search results.  Being a former member of the Yahoo Search team, it has always been a goal to match fresh content to a user and a query and that is a goal of Bing’s Social Search.  This is something that is continually being improved as well.  Enge brought up a great example of social search for the New York Post that was showing a few months back that is no longer in place.  Yiu pointed to engagement metrics as a reason why social search may change so much.  If people aren’t using the results, they are no longer enhancing the product:

“If the content doesn’t earn its spot, its placement gets modified.”

A few other key take aways on social indicators were:

• Friends social data get premium placement
• Friends of friends get special treatment
• Bing holds the maximum number of social enhanced results to three
• Conversations are not currently pulled into the search results

Author Authority

The most fascinating portion of the interview in my mind was Enge’s round of questioning on Author Authority.  Always a hot topic, Yiu did a great job of providing answers that should give marketers a big heads up on how to bolster their own authority on social search.

Yiu mentioned that spamming and gaming the system is a min attribute that Bing looks for and that the way people are connected and their networks help to flag spam.  He stated:

“We look at the way people are connected, and often we correlate that to the quality of a Tweet. We can also analyze the content the Twitter account links to. What does that mix look like, and how do people interact with the content you are tweeting. That’s just on the Twitter side of things.

On the Facebook side in a way we are still working on it; with Facebook most of the time it’s your true identity. On Facebook right now is just stuff from your friends, so it’s a different problem.”

Other signals that goes into the author authority on Bing are:

• Ratio of followers to following
• Retweets
• Sharing (as a strong indicator than just a like)
• Having good followers
• Following good accounts
• Tweeting about relevant topics
• Authority and Relevance of Retweeters

Yes, a new Google+ feature has been spotted in the wild that further blends organic results with social  information.  Early today State of Search and charliesaidthat noticed a thank you link on an organic listing next to the Google+ users who +1′d a result.

When logged in as a Google+ user, various editors here could see this functionality appearing sporadically on a range of search terms.  In order for the “Thank” link to show, the link in the results had to be +1′d from a circled user.   This functionality is currently only showing intermittently at the moment.  A Google rep did not comment further on this feature when asked for more information.

If a searcher did choose to thank someone for the +1, they were prompted to thank directly on Google+.  The message automatically contains the original +1er on the post:

This limited visibility post is shown directly on the wall of the user who is doing the thanking.  If you are looking to keep your appreciation of the +1 private, just make sure you don’t add in any other circles to the message:

Bas van den Beld performed a search related to the specific thank you post and found that some users were downright purplexed about the new communication:

Image credits: State of Search, CharlieSaidThat

Postscript: Google sent us the following statement:

Just like you would thank a friend in person for giving you a helpful recommendation, now if a friend’s +1 helped you find what you were looking for while searching on Google, you can immediately thank him or her by clicking the “Thanks” link right in your search results and writing a quick message. When your friend signs in to Google+, your thanks will appear in his or her stream. We’re continuing to try out new ways you can interact with the people you care about right on the results page.

The new laws would require that users would need to approve more than the standard 4,000 word contract if their personal information was to be used in ad targeting.  The EC  stated the following about the collection of personal data:

“If personal data is being passed on to a third party or used for targeted advertising then this should be made clear to the user when they sign up to the site and reinforced when users are invited to use an application.”

Facebook responded to the announcement by confirming the collection of data while assuring that the data stays anonymous.  The official Facebook statement given to The Telegraph:

“We can show relevant ads in a way that respects individual privacy because our system only provides advertisers with anonymous and aggregate information for the purpose of targeting ads.”

“We do not share people’s names with an advertiser without a person’s explicit consent and we never sell personal information to third parties.”

If Facebook does not conform to the new rules laid out by the EC, they could face legal action or a “massive fine.”  For more information see the full Telegraph article.

The grey icon is displayed next to a specific places results.  However, when clicked, the user is taken to the following Google+ only results page:

The surprising thing about the above listing is that the link goes directly to a personal account, not an actual Google+ page.  We had extreme difficulty replicating this on any other queries in different towns.

So are these personal Google+ citations in Places results a glitch,  or a sign of things to come? For more information see Blumenthals.com.

The only two weeks that  recorded higher traffic were the weeks that directly proceeded the public launch of Google+.  Last week’s traffic spike is likely due to the major page additions for brands, business and places that were released on Monday.  Expect these numbers to continue to rise with this week’s enhancements that further promote Google+.

Overall Google+’s October numbers trended upwards as well.  Total October traffic  increased by 3% vs September and the average time spent on Google+ saw an increase of 15%.  This is quite the turn around from previous reports showing downward trends.

Supporting information from the report showed that the share of returning visitors was yet another metric that saw gains.  The first two weeks of November saw an 18% increase of return visitors in comparison to the first two weeks of October.  Return visits had plummeted directly after the public release; this may be a positive sign that users are beginning to engage more on the social network.

For more information, please see the full Experian Hitwise report.

The selected companies are:

• Buddy Media
• Context Optional
• Hearsay Social
• HootSuite
• Involver
• Virtue